Three years later, regrettably, verbal promises made by former governor Arẹ́gbẹ́ṣọlá to teach the discovered alphabet in elementary schools across southwest Nigeria have gone unfulfilled. Arẹ́gbẹ́ṣọlá now serves as the Minister of the Federal Ministry of Interior of Nigeria.Ī reminder letter was sent to the governor of Osun state after promises made to teach the new alphabet have gone unfulfilled. In 2017, Chief Ògúntósìn, in the company of prominent traditional rulers in Yorùbáland and the diaspora, paid a visit to Rauf Arẹ́gbẹ́ṣọlá, the one-time governor of Nigeria’s Ọ̀ṣun State, in Òṣogbo, the state capital, to solicit support for his newly found Odùduwà alphabet.
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The following is a short video of teachers instructing students how to write the Odùduwà alphabet in a Benin classroom: He decided to narrate his dreams to a close spiritual adviser, Oníkòyí, king of Àjàṣẹ́ in Port-Novo, who counseled him to do what he was instructed in his dreams.įor this reason, he now travels from place to place in Yorùbáland to pass on his knowledge of the Odùduwà alphabet. Things started to become scary for Chief Ògúntósìn - he began to feel weak, he told Global Voices. I usually look old in my dreams - and tired - when I wake up from sleep. This time around, in 2016, I went to the sun again, I met a man, Lámúrúdu, who taught me the sound of the alphabet, he afterward sanctioned me to go all over the globe teaching people the mastery of the symbols. Every time I slept, I had similar dreams, going from planet to planet, teaching people how to use the script…įor three years, he kept dreaming about the alphabet, seeing visions consecutively, yet he did nothing about it. When I got to the sun, it was dark and I was shown the alphabet in the form of lightning. That night, he slept with the object under his pillow. He turned the entire room upside down and finally found it in a corner of the house.
He placed the object on the table and switched on the TV, only to discover, surprisingly, that the object he placed on the table had disappeared.
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With no light bulbs in the living room, he usually relied on light emitted from the rays of the TV screen. When he arrived, the house was completely dark. There, he found a “strange object” that he took with him back to Porto-Novo, Benin. The diviner, Olókun Awópẹ̀tu, told him to visit his ancestral shrine within the Farasinmi community in Badagry, Lagos State, Nigeria, and to take whatever he came into contact with at the shrine. In 2011, he approached a babaláwo or “diviner” of Ifa, the Yorùbá god of wisdom. As his cultural integration work progressed, however, he wanted to achieve more.
However, as a Yorùbá chief, he focused his cultural work on uniting the seven grandchildren of Odùduwa, serving as a mediator. Global Voices Yorùbá Lingua Manager Ọmọ Yoòbá interviewed Chief Ògúntósìn, via WhatsApp voice note messaging, to learn more about how he discovered this new alphabet.Ĭhief Ògúntósìn, now 43, explained that after the demise of his father in 1997, he had to care for his siblings as the oldest son and could not further his education after completing secondary school. Instilling this new writing system follows a history of ancient writing systems in Africa, like Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Adrinka collection of the Akan tribe of Ghana, Ethiopian Ge'ez, the Nsibidi ideographic script of West Central Africa which date back to 5000 BC, as well as Vai alphabet scripts are of African origin. Some language advocates contend that using Latin, a foreign script, to encode African languages, keeps the continent in an enslaved mindset. Ever since, thousands of books have been published in Yorùbá using Latin script instead of Ajami, an Arabic script used before 1843 to write in West African Indigenous languages such as Yorùbá and Hausa. In 1843, Reverend Samuel Àjàyí Crowther of the Christian Missionary Society developed the Yorùbá orthography by adopting Latin script with diacritics - or accent marks. Read more: Yorùbá loanwords: How languages evolve
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